


i can’t handle change

by ruruka



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-25 11:28:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22155310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: jounouchi katsuya is holding onto something.
Relationships: Jounouchi Katsuya | Joey Wheeler & Mazaki Anzu | Tea Gardner, Jounouchi Katsuya | Joey Wheeler & Mutou Yuugi, Jounouchi Katsuya | Joey Wheeler/Mazaki Anzu | Tea Gardner, Jounouchi Katsuya | Joey Wheeler/Mutou Yuugi
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	i can’t handle change

When she’d just turned fifteen, and he himself a month from eighteen, he decided he’d seen enough eyes ogling her on the subways home, enough of his _friends_ choking each other dead for a chance at her attention. He thought to himself that he’d give anything to take that stress and bear it himself, because she was five foot two and lacked peripheral vision while he never left home without a pocket knife folded up in his coat. 

“Shizuka,” he started, one afternoon they’d set up to spend together, pressed hip to hip on a public park bench with breeze lapping his hair like a thirsty hound. “I want to talk to you about something… ‘Cause I know Dad sure as hell won’t, so, you ought to learn from someone.”

When she’d looked to him there, her irises caught the sunlight, a perfect hazel caramel for him to inhale. “Hm?”

“Well, uh,” nibbled against his lip. But, no time for hesitating, not a man like himself. Shaking his head free felt a glory of nature. “Look, you’re not a little kid anymore, even if I still see you that way. And, so, uhh...I just- I just think it’s time you learned about the birds and the bees.”

Where she wore an everlasting smile fell flat.

“Katsuya...” She blinked round to breaking their gazes, hand clenching up between both collarbones. He remembers, then and now, select times she’d looked at him as she had right then, when they were just barely grade schoolers and he’d made the Barbies and Kens kiss, when he’d forgotten to mention the video tapes hidden on his closet floor before she went rummaging for something lost, when she’d been ten years old and visiting him at their father’s place, and he and Honda and their preteen punk selves had been too old for hopscotch and run their bike tires all over her chalk. Embarrassment, the one emotion Shizuka had ever struggled with, always portraying itself out as loud, violent pelts of anger. Stomped a foot on Ken’s face. Slammed the closet door and slapped bruises onto his shoulders. Ran crying to Dad that Katsuya had ruined her game, and he’d taken twice the hollering punishments as normal nights once his precious girlchild had gone home. Jounouchi doesn’t bother with resenting any of those moments. But on the park bench, a cold whistling December once he’d given her his jacket, he doesn’t _understand_ why she starts with that little pouty face of hers, all over a simple conversation starter.

“You don’t have to be _embarrassed,_ or nothin’,” he tries, hugging palms to their opposite biceps, begging warmth. “I’m not gonna go into any details, I just want you to be safe when it comes to boys and what not. Men are horrible.”

“Katsuya…”

“Make sure you don’t do anything you aren’t comfortable with.”

“You don’t have to worry about that, Katsuya, I-”

“And if you do, give me his address, and I’ll kill him.”

“Katsuya, I’m not-”

“Trust me, Shizuka, a man will say anything to get into bed with you. I don’t want you falling for-”

“Katsuya, I don’t like boys.”

The blank white sheet of ice overtop the park fountain, he could imagine it cracking right over his skull.

Jounouchi in that moment, if he can recall, swallowed, both a breath and the rest of his rehearsed tangent, and felt up the burn on the back of neck with one palm. 

“Oh.” His nose perks higher away. “Well, thank God.” A deep etched smile turns to face her. “But, yaknow, still be cautious. Sometimes people can just be plain evil regardless of what’s in their pants.”

“Genitals don’t equal gender, Katsuya.”

“Huh, oh, yeah, I know that.” A sniff. Another, deeper. “Don’t worry, your brother’s very with the times. I love folk of all kinds, gay, homosexual, lesbian, don’t like women, do like women, whatever. All I care about is if you’re a good person, and I want you to end up with a good person. Or else I’ll kill them. ...Her. Or, well, maybe I won’t kill a woman but, y’know, whoever has it coming has it coming in my eyes- Huh?”

To either of his shoulders, he’s sculpted in the kind weight of his windbreaker. Arms squeeze him from behind a brief moment. “Thanks for the awkward pep talk. I should get going, it’s almost dark. I had a lot of fun with you today.”

Facing her, Jounouchi marvels at the sight, the craft of her height and her heart-shaped face, the way she carries a purse that matches kindly to the denim of her pants. “Yeah...I did, too. See ya, Shizuka. Call me when you get home safe.”

“You, too.”

After a promise to, a nodded goodbye, he stays frozen on the bench, watching her move all the way to her bicycle, hardly breathes until the helmet is clicked under her chin and she’s lifting one final wave from several meters away. One he returns, weakly. He watches until she crosses the street, careful to wait for cars to stop on both sides the way he’d taught her when she was just about six. 

And then he leaves.

“Jeez, look at you, it’s three degrees outside, and you’re in a tee shirt?”

The front porch of her house is coated in a thin sheet of ice from last night’s frost. Jounouchi had liked the look of it shattering beneath his steps, some sort of radiant power about being able to destroy such a fragile act of life. He’d come to the door and knocked eight times or so, urgent to be rid of the chill chasing him all the way from the park. 

“Did you walk here?” she asks, inviting him inside with a step aside from the front door that he closes behind him. 

“Yeah, from the park,” he nods, peeling himself from his shoes at her prompting. “I saw Shizuka today.”

Anzu, behind him, pauses the maternal scolding to brighten, asking on her way to the kettle, “Really? How’s she doing?”

From the front door, he notes a spot of ice melting on the kitchen tile, wipes it with his socked foot as he pulls a seat out at the table. “She’s good. Your parents home?”

He remembers meeting Anzu when he was thirteen, outside of school at the football fields she’d cross to get home. Jounouchi had never seen her before the day he’d been knocking an older boy’s skull into the ground in exchange for calling his haircut shitty. Every so often, he’ll bring it up, say, hey, Anzu, remember the time we met when we were younger, and you just about skinned me alive, and then turned around and pushed the stupid kid down into the dirt when he called you a bitch for it? He tends to leave out the part where he’d agreed with the stupid kid in his mind, the way he’d gagged behind her back upon first becoming friends with Mutou Yuugi and therefore by extension with his only other friend, the loud mouthed Anzu girl in he and Honda’s algebra class. When they were thirteen, she’d been wearing an orange uniform top with its great big green neck bow. Now, it’s five years later and she’s making him hot chocolate he didn’t ask for but won’t decline, and she's wearing a pink sweater that’s too soft to touch, comfortable over her perfect curves, same as the way the white knee socks emphasize her dancer’s calves, and dare he not comment on just what the little fluffy pair of pajama shorts accentuate. 

A cup sets steaming before him. He watches Anzu add an inch of cold milk, stir it, blow the heat right into his face.

“My dad’s out of town for work stuff. I think my mom is grocery shopping.” For how long he’s forgotten to listen, he almost thinks she’s just turning the page on small talk until he can recall the question. Regardless, he’s nodding, picking up the mug to attempt a tentative sip. “Is that too hot? I can add more milk.”

“...It’s good,” he says once he’s recovered from the scald on his tongue, swallows politely as he sets it back down. Within what could only be seconds, he’s sure, he’s setting it down for the last time in the basin of her kitchen sink, the same kitchen sink he’s brushed a million crumbs into in the last two years, and then he’s led up the same stairs he’s tripped up nearly every time he’s taken them if only for the jutting top lip of wood he always forgets; her bedroom, naturally, is the same one he’s lived his life in, the same bathroom around the corner where he’d puked his guts up when Anzu’s parents went on a cruise their senior year and didn’t lock the wine cupboard. Jounouchi’s stayed as far from alcohol as possible aside from that one moment of weakness, because Anzu and Honda were both having a glass, and Yuugi would have been there to take his side if he hadn’t been strung up with a fever that weekend, Jounouchi remembers. But he doesn’t drink. It’d stunk, anyhow, the tart red wine Anzu’s fancy middle class parents like to drink. Anzu finished one glass, Honda tapping out after a few sips and leaving Jounouchi to take the rest of it. He’d tried to refuse, but Honda had all but thrown it at him, and maybe he wasn’t as drunk as they’d tried to tell him, because he can recall every finite detail down to the memories of childhood layering in his mind as he’d trembled over the upstairs toilet. 

He told Yuugi he thought he caught his flu, and Yuugi told him to come over and have the rest of his mother’s butajiru. Goddamn delicious it was.

When he sits on her bed, the blanket welcomes him. Something soft and kind among the treachery of half packed boxes stacking all about her room. Jounouchi watches her bend to place a folded towel into one, and before he can whine over it being too hard to see her pack, she moves to sit down beside him, hands unbusied. 

“Feeling warmer?” she asks, smirking at the mess he’s made of her bed in tugging the comforter all up around him. 

Within the bundle, Jounouchi nods. He nods, he sighs, he glances anywhere but the bright patches of paint on her walls where picture frames used to hang. Instead, he’s all agog to scan the corner behind him, where her pillows lay in an unkempt pile, and his interest detects a scruff amongst them. He picks the stuffed cat up by the ass. 

“You’re not gonna leave Katsu-nya behind, are you?” Looking from her to the toy, he clutches it in a writhing movement toward her, falsetto demanding, “Don’t forget me, Anzu! I’m your best bud!”

Laughter snorts from her in a swipe to grasp the cat into her lap. A claw machine gift he’d named in his own honor, dropped in her arms and called a going away present. Even if Honda had just about turned purple in his insistence that he’d been the one to win it, it’d been Jounouchi’s coin in the machine, meaning it was his luck and his right to name. “I’m not gonna leave him. I just haven’t packed him yet, because...he likes to sleep with me.”

“Hah, horny bastard takes after his papa,” sneers Jounouchi, to which she tuts her eyes high and drops the cat back behind them. 

“I still have a lot to do…” forlornly she thinks aloud, sighs in a glance over the remnants of her bedroom. He follows her eyes, stopping his own at the box just beside his foot. One short tap goes to the cardboard. Blankets fall from his shoulders to pool at his waist in a lean down to look inside. There he finds just where the frames and their pictures have gone, carefully nested in newspaper that his finger nudges aside. The top photo pokes a snort into his throat, gazing down at the rectangle of he, Yuugi and Honda’s stupidly posed faces squeezed into the frame of the phone she’d left on the table while using the ladies’ room. It’d taken an hour after parting ways before she dropped the picture into their group chat with a threatening _I’m printing this_ text tacked to the bottom. Anzu’s no liar.

“There you are,” she says in a lean to mimic his examining. “My three idiots.”

“Yours?” Jounouchi must tease, to which she replies back, “Of course. No one else wants you.”

Anzu’s no liar.

Vaguely, he stares at the photo another moment, reaching a finger to it as if it were a mirror world for him to be swallowed, transported back to Honda’s pinched circles of forefingers for goggles, Yuugi’s lolling tongue and eyelids pulled down by either index finger, his own finger pushing his nose, crosseyed in a click of the camera. They’d just about choked to heaven when Anzu returned from the bathroom and lifted her phone, suspicion curling for each of them.

He hits the flap on the box back overtop it. 

“...I’m gonna miss you like crazy,” Jounouchi tells her, candid until a laugh forces to cover it, yet still in that gaze for her does his truth shine. 

Anzu, in a tilt of the head, in a way that makes her hair fan out like brown silk, offers him a solemn smile and a hand gentle on his leg. 

“Believe me, this isn’t easy for me either,” she sighs, and rubs that hand ever delicate. 

Jounouchi glances to the pale pink of her knuckles, the chip in one nail. “Then...why go?”

The stroking hand pauses, Anzu puckering her mouth together like she’s thinking of an answer when Jounouchi really knows she’s only thinking of how to give it. “Because...it’s my dream,” she finally decides on. “I want to go to America, I want to dance professionally. If it didn’t scare the shit out of me, it wouldn’t be a dream worth chasing. Right?”

He spares a grin for her profanity. “Sounds like some kinda life advice I’d read in a...a lady magazine, or something.”

Anzu’s brows lower, mouth curved into a toying smirk. “What are you reading lady magazines for, Jounouchi?” Then, all at once, she’s wrinkling her perfect nose all up. “Nevermind. Don’t tell me.”

In a huff of herself, beneath his clap of laughter, she falls backward onto her mattress. Hands on the middle, legs dangling outward. Jounouchi suddenly loses his desire to laugh and rather desires his eyes on her. From this angle, she’s a lost cause staring up at the ceiling, hair longer than he can ever recall, hands twice as soft. From this angle she’s his everything, and when he moves to lay beside her, meeting her gaze at the sculpted white ceiling above, she’s his best friend, she’s his life. 

“...I think you should go,” he tells her, voice subtle, continues, “I mean, if you’re ever doubting yourself. Y’know, maybe this isn’t right for me, maybe it’s too soon… Forget all that. You’ve been a hungry lion since we were thirteen, don’t stop now.”

Perhaps it’s the comparison that makes her breathe a chortle there, and perhaps it is the sincerity in his voice that makes her hand reach out to link into his between them. 

“I love you, Anzu, you’re my best friend,” he says. “Besides my sister, you and Yuugi, you’re all I’ve got. ...And Honda, but don’t ever let me catch you telling him I said anything nice about him.”

She smiles soft and serene at him, squeezes her hand just once. “I know, Jounouchi, I know you love me. Me leaving won’t instantly make me forget about you, any of you. I mean it.”

“Yeah, but you’ll make all new friends, it’ll be like, they’re your friends and we’re...your _old_ friends.” His mouth slants. “...Not that I don’t want you to be happy. Of course I want you to make friends, and all that, just...don’t like anybody more than me, alright?”

Fondly, maybe, she raises to one elbow to turn toward him, peering down to the candor in his face. 

“I won’t forget about you, Jounouchi,” she says, twice as firm this time, and he, hot at the throat, can do little more than breathe. Until, he’s not breathing at all, anymore, never again, when he’s moving and the mattress creaks beneath him because it’s the same bed he’s sat on for two years, the same powder yellow walls she’d requested in nursery school and still defends to this day, and in those walls, he’ll sometimes remember and laugh himself sick over, if the dresser mirror is shifted enough, there’s a big ugly hole in the shape of his knuckles, because Honda had been giving him lip for two days straight and then had the audacity to duck. He remembers the moment there, frozen there, most entirely because Anzu hadn’t witnessed it, she’d been on the landline in the kitchen with her father at work, and in nothing but a pure fit of anxiety had Yuugi stood stark pale behind him and screamed an airless laugh and told him, “Anzu is gonna _kill_ you..!” And very nearly she had, only once she’d slipped back round her bedroom door to find her three idiots in the midst of dragging her dresser another foot left. 

Jounouchi can’t pinpoint exactly why it’s this memory that floods his head all the while he’s been leant up to catch Anzu’s mouth on his own, but, hell, it’s better than dwelling on the thought of this aftermath he’s about to cast on himself. 

He kisses her quietly, something he’s never managed with any other girl in any other bed. To that same notion, he doesn’t feel as he ever has with anyone else, nothing to Anzu’s discredit but normally by now he’s practically finishing all over himself before the girl’s ever got her top off. Now, he doesn’t feel...anything, hollow as he moves his lips on hers, but he tries, because he’s fantasized about this once or twice only- no, no it was definitely only once, back before he knew Anzu for more than just a classmate in a tiny skirt he imagined himself lifting up and seeing what color panties she wore. Then, he’d had to shift uncomfortably in his desk and think instead of their algebra teacher’s seventy four year old nudity to fix it, but later, later on, he’s placid in the times where they’ve known each other forever and Anzu doesn’t blush to kick her uniform off after school with her back turned to him, bending for her dresser drawers to find house clothes and kicking him right in the gut once he’d barked a laugh and said, “What, you buy those rolled up department store packs of undies? I could iron my shirt on your ass-!”

He kisses her now, in this moment, ruins it only with a hand moving up her side and ripping all the modesty away from the ordeal.

Anzu sits up. From this angle, she’s...something, she’s looming over him even if he can’t see her face quite right, but he tries, sits up beside her only to catch the way she’s smirking, wiping a wrist back over her mouth in messy strokes.

“That was... _bad_ , Jounouchi,” she laughs, smacking her lips once together. 

“ _HAH-?”_ croaks out from him, just before he’s assaulted in heat creeping up to fill his face. “What...what do ya mean, _bad?_ Come on-”

“Don’t ever do that without asking permission first,” Anzu turns to tell him, no humor in that warning. “I probably would have said yes...maybe. Just because I felt bad, that’s why I let you, anyway.”

Jounouchi could just about evaporate from the flush all across his face. “Uh...yeah, right,” croons his low, even tone. “Men are horrible.”

“You’ve never said anything smarter.” One push, and she’s standing, lifts her foot to push a box out of her forward path for the door. “C’mon, let’s go downstairs. I think I heard a car pull up, you can help my mom bring in the groceries.”

She doesn’t wait for him. He’s unfrozen by the will to catch her, thrashing himself free from her blankets to stumble past the box of picture frames, the dresser pulled left. He follows her out into the hall, down the stairs, forever. 

When he’s nineteen, he has enough bruises on his back to raise questions, and just enough money saved up for first last and security. 

“It looks really good, now that you have...y’know...uh, furniture.”

To that point, Jounouchi falls heavy onto the dusty cushions of his living room sofa. A black two seater. Everything is black and red and not quite soft. Everything. 

“You sure got lucky Otogi was getting rid of all this stuff,” his first ever real guest points out, glancing up toward the plant in its basket just beside the front apartment door. 

Jounouchi nods a broad, wolfy grin. “Dunno what the bastard’s gonna do once his road trip is over and he realizes he’s got no bed or couch or nothing, but, hey, at least I’ve got some luxury.”

“Minimalism,” the other comments for no particular reason, focus still stuck on the ivy over his head. 

Tilting, Jounouchi perks a single brow. His head sits perched on one hand, legs folded up short. “Hey, Yuugi, you want that thing?”

“Hm?” brings him back to life enough to turn and face him. “Ah, no, that’s okay.”

“You sure? ‘Cause I’m not gonna take care of it. Otogi said it was like a son to him. I told Honda to throw it out, but he hung it up there, ‘cause he’s a dumb twat.”

Yuugi laughs, steering himself to sit in front of Jounouchi’s folded up legs on the sofa. “I’ll have to move in and water it, I guess.”

“You mean that?” All too sudden, Jounouchi’s up higher in his lean, stares direct for Yuugi’s face, incredulous. “There’s a little pantry room by the kitchen, but it’s got a window, so I could turn that into another bedroom, and you could-”

“Jou…”

“Okay, fine, I’ll take the pantry and you can have the one room. It’ll be-”

“I can’t just _leave_ my family, Jounouchi,” Yuugi winces to say, fingertips tapping noiselessly together. “...I was only kidding. I’m sorry.”

But he does not relent. Fingers tap the curve of his arm. “Come on, Yuugi, you’re nineteen years old-”

“Eighteen.”

“Eighteen years old-”

“My birthday is in June, Jounouchi.”

“You’re eighteen years old and…” A hand thrums with the thoughts roaring in his head, “eight months. That’s old enough to move out of your parents’ house. ...Parent. ‘S.”

Yuugi gives him a straight laced look. 

“It’d be fun,” Jounouchi tries next. “Think about the million sleepovers we’ve had in your room. It’ll be just like that, except I won’t get a call from my old man in the morning hollering at me to get home, and you, you won’t have to explain to Grandpa why the coffee table’s broken ‘cause we were pretending to be Black Magician and Black Magician Girl, ‘cause if we break Otogi’s stupid coffee table, we can just throw it away no questions asked.”

Yuugi gives him a straight laced look- or he tries to, but folds, overcome with the urge to snort behind a hand. “Grandpa almost ripped your ear off for that.”

“And it wasn’t even my fault, _you_ were the one standing on the table-”

“Because _you_ convinced me to-!”

“Well, Black Magician is taller than Black Magician Girl, it had to be accurate.” 

Without grandeur, Yuugi sighs, leaning his weight back onto the legs behind him. Still, an amused smile lingers. 

“Maybe living here isn’t a bad idea…”

“You could still work at the game shop,” he urges. “It’s only a six minute drive, I already calculated.”

He smiles again, more wry this time, tapping a finger to the chin. “I don’t know… It’s a lot to think about.”

“C’mon, lemme show you the rest of the place, so you can think about it better.”

Excitement pulls Jounouchi up to his feet to grasp Yuugi’s wrist the same. Freed, he leads him to the center of the present room, a living room rectangle decorated in a couch, table, television with null but three channels currently. And a plant. Yuugi glances to it briefly, moving after to catch up with Jounouchi’s shift into the next room.

“Here’s the kitchen, and see, this is the room I was talking about.” The door to it slides opened, two heads peeking inside the sliver of space. “It’s even got a lightswitch and everything.”

“Just the switch..?”

Darkening, Jounouchi pushes him from the room with a pull of the door back shut. “Still needs a bulb. Baby steps. Now follow me this way.”

On the way past the kitchen they find a _short_ hallway, a door to the bathroom and a door to the bedroom, the first of which Jounouchi opens and gestures inside with a _hah, hah, how ‘bout it_ type of grin, Yuugi noting the box of unpacked toiletries on the sink despite it being Jou’s second week in the place. His grimace is shadowed by the door’s closing, traded for the bedroom realm unfolding for his eyes only. 

When Yuugi steps inside, Jounouchi thinks he looks impressed by the layout of his room, a plain queen size bed with a boxspring and sheets and everything, practically goddamn à la mode; Otogi had said it, everything must go, take it. The dresser is short and three drawered. Beside it clothes hang on closet rods, and atop it, carkeys, a half drunk grape ramune, a mall photobooth strip that Yuugi picks up to examine closer. Jounouchi sees over his shoulder the progression in each frame, the way he’d been the one to say, hey, four frames, four of us, that led them each to timing out their own photograph. From the top down, Jounouchi smiles with a hero guy thumbs up, Honda flaunts two peace signs, Yuugi- well, Yuugi had tried his best to time it, so the still shot of only his left arm is commendable in itself. In the final frame- and Jounouchi watches it now, the way real life Yuugi so cautiously unfolds the fourth frame forward again to reveal Anzu’s handmade heart and grinning, flawless mouth. 

“...It’s, ah, hard to look at her all the time,” Jounouchi mumbles to the question not yet asked, perhaps never to be, if he knows Yuugi as well as he knows he does, knows he’s keen on emotions and reading a room. 

Evened, Yuugi nods. “I get what you mean. She only moved a few months ago, but it feels a lot longer.” The photo strip lays back down to the dresser top, Yuugi’s delicate palm smoothing it out flat. “...She called me the other day, actually. She said her parents were cleaning up her room and asked her how the big hole got in her wall. Do you remember that?”

Jounouchi matches Yuugi’s cuff of laughter. 

“Yeah, yeah. I remember. My knees still hurt when it rains.”

“You’re lucky I gave her the pillow,” Yuugi murmurs. “Anzu usually goes for hand to hand combat.”

In a shake of himself, Jounouchi strides to sit on the foreign feel of the bed. “Seems like we were always beatin’ the hell outta each other. Well, us three, at least. You were never much of a brawler. Not really fair, now that I mention it.”

“I think you and Honda did enough of that before we were friends…” Yuugi scoffs, huffs, sits himself down beside Jounouchi with a tug of his jacket tighter. No heat. Yet. Regardless, a tiny smirk offers his way. “And it may have been the Pharaoh you were punching, but it was still _my_ face. I felt that for days.”

“And who took care of you, gave you icepacks, made sure your nose wasn’t broke-”

“Anzu-”

“ _Me,_ that’s who.” Jounouchi billows a hot exhale. He stares only a moment at Yuugi’s smoldering attempt to keep his humor at bay, nudging him with an elbow on his lean to reach the window above the pillows. Pulling the curtain back, just a corner, they watch the evening dark, snow cascading over it in thick streams. 

“It’s snowing pretty hard…” Yuugi notes with a bite for the inside of one cheek. 

The curtain falls from his touch, leaving the room in darkness again. “You wanna stay over? It’s probably better not to drive in this weather. We can order a pizza and watch the weird local channel.”

Hands place into Yuugi’s thin lap. He hesitates, Jounouchi can see, then says, “Don’t you have a VHS player?”

“Oh. Yeah,” Jounouchi perks, nods, eyes Yuugi’s growing smirk and lifting brows just long enough for it to click, and he starts tapping the opening _AKIRA_ track on his legs. 

“Yup,” Yuugi grins.

“ _Sweeeet_ , this’ll be- Oh.” In his rise, Jounouchi pauses instead to limply glance him over. “Forgot, uh, I smashed the VCR over my dad’s head when I was moving, ‘cause he kept trying to say the tapes I was taking were his.”

“Oh,” Yuugi cringes, sits back farther on the bed once Jounouchi props himself up against the pillows. “That’s okay. We’ve probably watched _AKIRA_ so many times that the tape wouldn’t even work.”

“Yeah,” he nods. “...Guess we’ll just have to sit here and talk about our feelings.”

A swipe of the head pins Jounouchi with a knowing look. “You first.”

Within the dark of the room, he raises both hands in defeat. Grins. “Alright, alright, you got me. ...We can make funny phone calls and hang up really fast.”

“The last time you did that, Anzu almost called the police.”

“Yeah, I think she probably recognized my voice,” Jounouchi barks, thinks more deeply. His outstretched foot taps Yuugi on the hip. “Well, I’m out of ideas. Unless you wanna try and see who can pee furthest again.”

“What have you been doing for two weeks here?”

Close to immediately, Jounouchi pales. “...Well, y’know. Every man has his needs...”

Yuugi gags, “ _Gross_ , Jou,” to which he demands, “What? You can’t tell me that’s not what you do when you’re bored. You’re the horniest little fuck I think I’ve ever met.”

“I mean…” trails into color across his cheekbones. He laughs in astonishment, scratching one finger beside his lip.

“There you go, then, that’s that,” says Jounouchi’s slap on a knee. “Get those pants off, Yuugi, we’re gonna make the best of this Amish living.”

“ _Jounouchi.”_

They’re giggling, because it’s all jokes, jokes, jokes. “Come on, there’s no way you’ve never looked me up and down and thought damn, I need me a piece of that.”

They’re giggling, laughing, more so Jounouchi solo when it is that Yuugi’s eyes trail vaguely away. “Well…”

“Hold on,” he says in a dart, throat silenced beneath the lift of both brows. A hand extends flatly outward. “What are you about to say here? _‘Well’? Well_ what?”

“Nothing, Jou,” fades into a clearing of the throat. 

Yuugi pulls his jacket tighter.

Jounouchi scratches a hand on his neck.

Yuugi balls his hands up in his lap.

Jounouchi, in a sudden rush, snurks amusement out his nose.

“You think I’m sexy, Yuugi?!”

“No!” he stands up like a board prompts him to, face glowing scarlet in the dark, dark room. “I- I was just kidding, it’s nothing. I think I’m gonna go home, the snow isn’t that bad-”

“Wait, Yuugi, come on,” he’s quick to plead, to rise and stand beside him. “Don’t leave, I’ll stop teasing you. It was just a joke, I get it.”

With a swallow, he nods, blush still feverish overtop his skin. Jounouchi glances away just enough to whisper, mutter out, “...But, I mean, if you ever really wanted to-”

“Jounouchi, I’m serious-”

“I am too,” he shrugs, abrupt even to himself. “It wouldn’t be weird. Me and Anzu messed around a little bit before she left. It’s just, I dunno...it’s just friend stuff.”

Yuugi stares up at him the way a carpet looks at a declawed cat.

The difference between Jounouchi and Anzu and Jounouchi and Yuugi, the difference between that time and this one, consists of the way it’d come about. Jounouchi took the surge of love in his chest to mean he’d better move in closer and kiss her before she could leave him for good, the only goodbye he knew proper enough to showcase the promises yet all the same nothing close to proper or moral. He had liked kissing Anzu the same way he likes the storebrand cereals he’s always eaten. Jounouchi had struggled in school but he didn’t lack street smarts, or the knowledge enough to know how to work a stove or pay a bill. He never folded his clothes, but he did know how, and he knew how to cover all that up with bragging, he’s just talented he’s just skilled, no he hadn’t grown up taking care of himself and no that cut on his lip wasn’t new, just quit asking questions and pop _AKIRA_ in already, would ya? When he kissed Anzu, he forgot about being thirteen and watching her throw a high schooler into the dirt, remembered her doing it to him instead, all the times he’s deserved it, and even if it didn’t hurt, he wonders why it didn’t, thinks it probably should have. But it didn’t hurt as bad as the way she’d let him keep kissing her, and it didn’t hurt as bad as watching her seal the packing tape around the picture frame box.

It’s different with Yuugi. Jounouchi doesn’t feel much more than his own nerves as he stands in the bathroom that he hardly yet calls _his,_ poised before the mirror with a cap of mouthwash swishing round his teeth. When he spits, his gums burn, the same way his throat does when he takes another mouthful and swallows, just for good measure. He’s frantic for just a moment, throwing his shirt on and off three times before deciding it can stay, and the swipe of deodorant under both arms is a miracle worker. 

It’s different with Yuugi because he feels like it should be, and he’s set to leave before he remembers to remember the one thing he’d come in there for, sticking a fist in the box labeled _BATHROOM_ in crude red marker. It’s different because the condom package feels just _awkward_ in his hands, shaking it like a wet polaroid before it stuffs into a jean pocket.

In his bedroom, to the very edge of the bed Yuugi perches, arms stiff beside him in gripping the mattress lip. 

“...Hey,” pipes Jounouchi from the doorway. It gathers his attention only enough to look up, to watch as he’s approached. “You...you comfortable?”

Yuugi doesn’t seem to think before he’s nodding. Jounouchi cannot decide whether the smile he sees is put on in bravery or genuine as Yuugi himself. 

“If you don’t wanna do this-”

“It’s okay,” he insists with another nod. “Like you said...it’s just friend stuff.”

“Right.” 

They remain still a moment before Jounouchi sits in a single heavy motion, palms wiping their sweat to his denim. When he looks at Yuugi, everything is different, because he’s not interested in men in the slightest, but Yuugi is and that’s perfectly fine, and, hell, this might just be where he has his own awakening. So much has changed, his sexual preference may as well, too. 

“Uh, I’m…” Jounouchi begins, lifts one hand to his best friend’s face. “I’m gonna...just…”

Yuugi nods again, and Jounouchi breathes him in through the nose.

They kiss much differently than he and Anzu had. He had never once felt her lips tremble or her pulse raise. In fact, too, Yuugi doesn’t kiss like any girl he’s ever lain around with, not the vapid ones or the needy ones or the ones who’d lost a bet. Yuugi kisses like he’s done it before, like someone’s just grabbed him by the mouth at a dark nightclub and he’s no reason to refuse it. Jounouchi isn’t sure how to take it at first, but it’s weirder with his eyes open, so he shuts his mind up and enjoys the moment. Enjoys it, yes, he thinks, but he can’t help but wonder why Anzu hadn’t kissed him this way.

They move apart at no one’s prompting. Yuugi smiles something tender, hardly able to meet his eye, though Jounouchi’s gracious enough not to either as he watches his best friend move to lay at the midst of the bed. It’s loud when Jounouchi follows, like the mattress is tight from lack of use, something worth laughing over amid Yuugi’s groan of being landed on top of at full weight.

There’s still a smile on his mouth as it moves to Yuugi’s neck, and he does not notice until this moment that there’s a leather choker laying on the nightstand table; he kisses Yuugi’s throat until he feels a hum vibrate beneath his lips, and then he bites, because girls usually like it when he bites.

“Gh- that- that hurt, Jounouchi.”

Blinking, he turns a look up higher, laughs an apology, goes back more gently to his canvas. By the time there’s matching hickies on Yuugi’s neck and clavicle, placed there nicely like wedding bands or the namecards on the tables, Jounouchi decides he’d ought to stop stalling and ought to stop pretending he hadn’t been stalling more every time he heard a moan. 

He lifts himself to two arms, hovering. “You’re, uh...you’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

It’s snowing outside and Yuugi looks at him, face lined in flush, mind rolling. Subtly, he shakes his head. “Don’t worry about that…”

“Well, I don’t wanna mess anything up, or take anything from you-”

“I’m not, Jounouchi,” he suddenly clips, which surprises in a dozen different ways. “Don’t worry.”

“You’re not..?” he says, and he’s standing on his knees where the surprise shifts at speed to indignity. “You mean my best friend in the world didn’t tell me when he got his cherry popped?! You’re kiddin’ me. I think I told my goddamn mailman when that girl from school went all the way with me.”

“Just...don’t worry about it, okay?” Yuugi begs, leaning up on both elbows. “But...if you want to stop at any time, just know it’s okay. ...Okay?”

Yuugi does not pose it as a challenge. Whoever taught him to kiss that way does. 

In one push Jounouchi’s back atop him, holding his face in both hands and falling forward in a mess of kissing tongues. He feels Yuugi’s own hands lift to find his hair, a knee bending up beside him as if to welcome him in. 

It’s different with he and Yuugi, because he’s never wanted to take a girl to the mall, or play Nintendo with a girl until their eyes burned, he’s never slept so many times in a girl’s twin size bed and felt so comfortably squeezed up, or known any girl so intimately as to tell when she’s not herself, she’s someone different, she’s someone leaking confidence and pride who’s gone now but still thought about, usually late at night when it’s too hot for even a box fan in the window, he’s never wanted a girl like that or loved any girl at all the way he loves Yuugi, and perhaps that isn’t grounds to be doing what he’s doing but it’s still something to think about. He’s never jumped on a girl’s bed while she’s folded up under the covers, sick in the lying mind, never sung so loudly as to ache his throat and get the neighbors bellowing out their open summer window all just to make her laugh, smile, come on, just a smile, and he’s never felt such a surge of glory to see any girl’s mouth curl up into a sniffly laugh beneath raw rimmed eyes. And no girl would ever do the same for him. No girl would give him the rest of her mother’s butajiru.

Perhaps it’s something to think about. Think about enough to realize the way he feels for Yuugi is different than how he feels for girls, and it’s different from Anzu, but not too strictly, because what he’d felt for both of them was love, love too great in his skin that he’d mistaken it for lust, because that’s the only way Jounouchi had ever thought about love before, he thought he’d loved all those girls in the backseat of his car or in his bed when his father was out cold somewhere else, and he’d thought they’d loved him, too. 

When he wakes up, it’s because he’d forgotten he went to sleep at all. But it’s morning now, and the snow has stilled, just coating the outside earth like a painted lake. 

The blankets, which are black, slide down his bare chest when he turns toward the opposite corner. Yuugi’s curled over pulling his atrociously skinny jeans up into a buckle at his waist. Could have been fooled, though, knowing he’s anything but legs and the baggy white tee shirt that smells of mouthwash and two weeks of man. 

“You’re...leaving?” says his morning voice, clearing it into a fist as he blinks away the rest.

Yuugi jumps, just a bit, pauses with one boot on to turn and face Jounouchi. And standing there, curtains spread enough for just a nose to peek through, washed in that light, standing there before him wearing Jounouchi’s shirt, he smiles.

“I have an early shift at the shop today,” he says, bending to pick his jacket off the floor, and Jounouchi watches him shrug it on in time to stuffing his foot into the second shoe. When he rises, he looks almost hesitant to meet his eye, glancing fondly about the floor. “I’ll see if there’s any VCRs in the backroom. Grandpa used to sell a bunch of different electronics.”

“...Yeah. Cool.” He pulls the comforter higher up his hips. “Or maybe it’s about time I got a DVD player, anyway.”

Hand into a pocket, Yuugi nods a laugh. “I’ll check. See you later.”

He’s able to move one step toward the door before he’s stopped.

“Yuugi, hey…” Jounouchi croons, craning his neck to meet where he’s walked away. “...You still wanna move in with me, don’t ya?”

Paused, stilled, ethereal, Yuugi faces him with a candor in his eyes never set on any other human being he’s ever known. “Sure, Jou. You’ll always be my best friend.”

He waves himself out. Jounouchi watches, watches, watches, never not the spectator, the protective gild over gold, as if he were on the sidelines of his very own story. 

He lays in a bed that isn’t his, and thinks by now he owes his sister a phone call.


End file.
